The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in children's speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule. (Author/CTM)

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. "Cognition," 87, 151-178], we provided cross-linguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument…

The authors respond to Winograd's critique (TM 503 198) of their previous article on the contributions of artificial intelligence to the scientific study of language (EJ 161 384). Winograd's interpretations of the "Chomskian paradigm," and of statements made in Dresher and Hornstein's original paper, are challenged. (GDC)

The author accepts some of the technical comments in Dresher and Hornstein's article on artificial intelligence (AI), (EJ 161 384, Cognition, December 1976), but disagrees with several other comments. Although Dresher and Hornstein unquestioningly adopt Noam Chomsky's paradigm for the study of language, their real point is that AI researchers are…

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are…